


epithet

by mun



Category: Psycho-Pass
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, Post-Sinners of the System C.3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 13:55:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20743298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mun/pseuds/mun
Summary: In the second before he can look away, Makishima smiles at him.





	epithet

With the loss of humanity came moral apathy.

Grey now seeped into the things that were once in colour like a poison eating away into all that used to be. Feeling yourself slipping further and further away from who you were, holding on to familiarity with a single thread so tightly that your knuckles bleed white even as the desire to just let go yearns like the beckoning of a loved one.

It’s not instantaneous but it isn’t slow either. Shinya was familiar with this feeling, had made peace with it when everything had first started draining away to leave only the solace that revenge could grant him and he’d grabbed onto that purpose with the locked jaws of a desperate animal that’d never truly let itself be tamed.

But it was only in the deafening silence that came after the gunshot, ringing through the dipping valley of hyperoats like a thundercrack on the horizon that Shinya realized that he’d also lost his ability to mourn what once made him human.

Blood ran over the ground to his feet, spilling over silken ivory to look every bit the part of sacrilege and still Shinya felt nothing. No relief, no joy, no more anger— only the emptiness spreading through his veins and into the beating heart in his chest until vaguely he remembers that this is no time to linger.

Maybe someone else would have taken the body with them, maybe another would’ve spit on the ground a murderer now rested.

But Shinya stares, stares for a moment longer, then tightens the grip he holds on both the revolver and that thread fraying ever thinner before walking away from everything he knew.

—

Human beings built the cages they now live in themselves, owing no one but their neighbors and the haunted reflection in the mirror for the shackles they now wore.

“Morals, ethics, and values are human creations,” came the quiet agreement and not for a second did Shinya take pause though he knew full well it was not his own voice he heard. “Life as it is now is the largely meaningless business of suffering and striving.”

Shinya mulled that over, thought of all the times he’d watched the oracle herself turn her back on the people she was supposed to be protecting. All of the occasions he’d held the gun to someone’s tear-streaked face and pulled the trigger because his master said “bark”.

A prison that others called a utopia, a false god who rewrote the definitions of humanity to suit her own needs.

“That’s enough,” he says quietly, sternly, as he takes a single long drag of the cigarette between his fingers and stares out into the world without the iron bars in his view for the very first time.

—

Adjusting was difficult, far more than he’d thought it would be.

The days are long but the nights always stretch longer. Dreams filled with desperate voices and the faces of people Shinya can’t remember in the instant he wakes with cold sweat on his skin and a racing heart in his chest.

Once upon a time he’d been the person the world wanted him to be.

Now he spent most of his days on his back in his undershirt, a broken man on the cheap ugly bedspread of a by-the-hour motel room staring at the water stains on the ceiling.

Sometimes he thought about why he’d done what he had.

Sometimes he tried to figure if Sasayama was resting peacefully now.

Masaoka, Kagari, Yuki.

But mostly he stared at the ceiling to avoid locking eyes with the man who’d followed him here to perch himself in the window with gleaming amber eyes staring at the outside world like he couldn’t possibly drink in enough of the view a shitty roadside inn could offer.

He wonders if this was purgatory.

—

The days turn into weeks and months and years and yet not once does Shinya look behind him.

He’s not the same person he was and no longer is there a home for the man he’s become.

Their faces get blurrier, the ghosts’ voices grow fainter.

Makishima remains at his side.

—

Akane no longer looked like the girl he’d once known, her face slimmer with the loss of baby fat and her eyes harder with the years far beyond her age she’s lived within the System. Her mouth sets in a hard line and she checks behind herself at every dark corner with a tension inlaid her step that speaks testaments to the paranoia that’s sprouted and grown in the years since he’s last seen her.

She asks him to come back and she doesn’t understand why he can’t.

He’s let her down again and yet he still can’t bring himself to regret the path that he’s chosen for himself.

Not even when Ginoza’s knuckles connect with the fine bones of his face, or he sees the eyes of a stranger staring back at him from the face that used to belong to his closest friend and childhood companion. There’s loss and growth and a strange degree of peace there that Shinya can’t help but envy.

They’re not the same people they were.

But then again; neither is Shinya.

—

It'd once been wrote, "the man who lies to himself will soon learn that he can no longer distinguish the truth within or around him".

There was never any hope someone who'd lived in the haze of a lie his entire life.

—

There are days he catches a glimpse of a reflection in the mirror.

In the second before he can look away, Makishima smiles at him.

—

The world outside of Sibyl is hardly much of one at all. Some part of Shinya had known this but reading about the concept of war was very different from living it.

Real gunfire is loud. He’d learned this quickly, learned it intimately when his finger pulled the trigger of a antiquated revolver or his hands held a sniper rifle mere .s away from his face. The damage is devastating and all of it is wielded by people and their own wills alone.

It’s chaos.

It’s chaos and there’s something horridly perfect about it, something about the spark in peoples eyes as they lived their lives. Makishima enjoyed the

Shinya meets people. Allies, friends, enemies.

And then one day Tenzin comes into his life.

—

The girl reminds him of himself but in all the worst ways.

She comes to him seeking revenge, eyes burning with it in the haunting kind of way of a child who’s seen and done things she should’ve never have had to. You can see it in the set to her jaw, the far-off look that falls over her face. The strain in her small shoulders that pains Shinya to see in someone so young, someone who deserves so much more than the hand life has dealt her.

She comes to him seeking revenge and the first thing Shinya sees is himself all those years ago with a finger tensed the trigger of a gun. Angry, embittered, consumed with resent and hatred until the only thing visible through the black edges of his vision were that curling smirk and too-bright eyes of a man that was nothing but pure fire.

Destructive, consuming. Beautiful.

“She’s just like you were,” Makishima says one night, hazy against the blue cast of moonlight as he stares off into the distance as though he’s watching and understanding something that Shinya couldn’t possibly hope to ever see for himself.

There’d always been something about the man that had seemed intangible, untouchable. He’d never belonged there in the gilded cage with the rest of him and he’d known it. 

And then just like all the other times he turns to look back at Shinya with the same searching gaze that peels away every layer piece by piece until Shinya lays raw and exposed under it like a moth pinned to a display board.

“Sometimes,” Shinya answers, looking away before he can suffocate and thinking back to all the times Tenzin has proven herself to be resourceful, independent, and compassionate above all else.

She was better than he was. She could be someone better than what he’d become.

He would teach her to fight, teach her to make her own choices for when she’d finally arrived to that rolling hill overlooking the golden field.

And when she got there she would do things differently than he had.

Shinya looks back at Makishima, to the curve of his smile and the hollow of his clavicles that’d become as familiar to him as the palms of his own hands.

“She won’t make the same mistakes I did.”

Makishima’s smile twitches a bit as though he were amused like that. He picks himself up from the chair with the same oiled grace of a predator moving in on its prey and moved closer to where Shinya lay propped up against the headboard of his bed.

His head tilts as he seems to appraise Shinya. The bed dips when he takes his seat and Shinya doesn’t think about it.

“You have regrets,” Makishima says, understanding filtering through the lilt of his voice in the silent question he didn’t need to ask.

Shinya exhales, for a moment feeling everything as it crashes into him with the surge of a wave pulling anything it could touch down into the depths and under the weight of the world.

“I got too close,” he murmurs as his eyes slip closed against the sting of it all because it hurts to feel everything at once after becoming so used to the numb of the cold.

His eyes don’t open until his breathing has finally evened out again but he doesn’t need to look to know that he’s been left alone once more.

—

“Together we could’ve changed the world.”

Smoke curls into the air.

“Maybe.”

—

Frederica is like a rock in a storm. She’s thoughtful and intelligent and driven and Shinya finds himself warming to her with every moment she shows more and more of a side that reminds him of the best parts of the people he’d once known.

But although she doesn’t want him in chains, she does want to take him back in a collar.

She knows how to play the game of getting what she wants and she knows that if she waits out this mess they're in there's ever the chance he'll slip and take the devil's bargain she's offering him.

It never gets easier, accepting that there’s no home for him or place to accept him unless he’s under someone else’s thumb.

He wonders if this is how Makishima felt in the moments before he let go of the thread.

—

“Why am I still here?” Makishima asks one night, laying on the bed next to Shinya. He turns to face him with amber eyes glowing in the cast of the rising sun’s glow, hair fanning out onto the sheets like a halo around his head.

“I don’t know,” Shinya tells him, throat tightening. He can’t look away.

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not.”

Makishima watches him for a few moments more, eyes flickering as though he’s thinking. As though a figment of the delusion from Shinya’s sick mind could actually be capable of thinking or of feeling and it sends that roiling, prickling feeling of disturbance over Shinya’s skin as he still finds himself as unable to look away from the fire as he’s always been.

“You are,” Makishima says softly, tilting his head a bit further as the smirk begins to pull at his lips and amber eyes begin to narrow and just like that Shinya’s reminded.

The anger has long since burned way to the acceptance found in the embers but this man is still an antagonist, a provocateur. A criminal and a murderer and God knows the only person Shinya’s ever truly found himself unable to keep away from despite the blistering burns now disfiguring the remains of his soul and the person he once took pride in being.

Shinya doesn’t answer.

Somehow he knows Makishima wasn’t expecting him too.

—

“Do you hate me for what I did?” Shinya asks him one night, already half a bottle of cheap scotch into the evening and no longer able to keep himself from slurring the first things that jump into his addled mind.

Makishima smiles at him.

“Never.”

—

“I’m worried about her,” Shinya says aloud.

Tenzin was slipping. He could feel it. Sliding through his fingers and out from his guidance like sand in an hourglass and he’d never known how to keep things from breaking and falling apart.

“She has you,” Makishima answers him, calm and rational as he hovers by the nightstand and stares at the dog-eared novels laying there with a longing so deep that Shinya has to look away. “There’s no need to be.”

—

“Are you going to go back?” 

“There’s nothing for me there. Not anymore.”

Makishima hums.

"Too bad you don't really believe that."

"I don't need to," Shinya says shortly, flicking his lighter for no reason other than the agitation he felt crawling over his skin whenever this topic was hanging heavy in the air. "If I go back, I die." 

Sibyl had never given up on him, had never withdrawn the long-reaching arms of the law chasing after him. Those eyes watching for him wanted him with the same sleepless kind of tenacity that would last long after he was dead and gone.

He'd always known there would be no going back once he'd crossed the line that he had. 

"That doesn't really matter though, does it?" Makishima reasons mildly, still speaking in the same silvery kind of voice that had cut men down to their knees and set the city of millions on fire. "You want to go back. You never wanted to leave."

"I made my choices." 

"I know that."

"I don't regret anything."

"I know that too."

Shinya breathes, the sound of it shaky and troubled. He picks his head up to meet Makishima's gaze from where he'd perched himself against the window.

"There are still things that need to be done there," Makishima reminds him quietly. 

"I don't know if I can," he tells him quietly and it's only because it's _Makishima_ and Makishima already _knows_ that Shinya lets himself say this aloud even as it tears at the inside of his throat liked barbed wire to admit.

"You can," Makishima says. 

"Fine, I don't know if I want to leave all of this."

It was a war-torn world outside of Sibyl but it was a free one. The colours were vibrant, the people were without shackles. It was the new life he'd built for himself and he'd have to give everything up once again to return to a place of iron and stone and unblinking gazes watching from every shadow.

"Then stay here." Like it was all that easy and maybe it was.

Shinya bristles. "It's not that easy."

A beat of silence before Makishima starts laughing. 

"Shinya," he says, "you never changed. You're still the same man you always were."

Always obsessing always rerunning every possibility through his mind until they drove him so close to the edge of madness he could hear the wind whistling from the depths before him. Waiting until the snap of emotions drove him to the action he believed was right— no matter the consequences.

He lowers his head, the action stilted and slow.

"I know," he hears himself manage brokenly, staring down at the flex of his hands and fighting the itch to reach for his cigarettes for _something_ to distract himself.

There was blood here. Blood he'd spilled and lives he'd taken and the ghost of a dead man wandering about his room that Shinya was becoming increasingly convinced that he couldn't possibly hope to live without. 

He wanted to be different. 

Makishima's lip twitches, his head tilts back in that way that he did and for the barest of seconds, Shinya could've sworn he was _proud_.

"Now," he drawls, "are we going back?"

—

He'd been living in the past for so long that he'd all but forgotten how it was not to spend every waking hour with the heavy burdens of regret seeping into the joints of his bones and across the tired span of his shoulders.

He was no Atlas and the world that existed in his memories had long since grown too heavy to bear.

Shinya smiles against the first streaks of dawn filtering across the sky and lets himself step forward.


End file.
